"Alternative to Microsoft Office" Must Use Free/Open Standards/Formats for Real Sovereignty
Earlier this year: 10 Easy Steps to Follow for Digital Sovereignty in Nations That Distrust GAFAM et al
Free software is important, but what about storage formats and encodings?
"Europe is building an alternative to Microsoft Office", says this report (we saw more like it), but as an associate puts it "this will succeed or fail, in-part, based on open formats, which are worryingly not mentioned at all."
Some office suites that call themselves "open source" are not,
many are pushing OOXML Microsoft*, and
some are controlled by Russia, not Europe.
Is the Germany-centric LibreOffice the way to go?
And speaking of Germany, what ever happened to SUSE? Is it German? Swedish? American (Novell)? What will it be next now that it is reportedly floated for sale long after Novell's collapse?
An EU site has just recalled the German roots and asked, "will the Linux player remain European?"
To quote the article about the Office alternative:
Office.eu, a cloud-based office suite built entirely on open-source software and hosted exclusively on European servers, has launched as a direct competitor to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its pitch is straightforward: keep data in the EU, run on transparent open-source components and comply with EU law by design.
And about SUSE:
Originally German, SUSE is now owned by Swedish investment company EQT and officially based in Luxembourg. A complex, yet European affair. But now EQT is considering selling SUSE. Is a takeover by a non-European company on the cards, and what would the consequences be?Sovereignty is a hot topic, and fears about American interference in Europe’s IT infrastructure are omnipresent. Technology, complex as ever, is an international affair. Somewhere in the software supply chain, there are always non-European companies, even if, for convenience’s sake, you count open-source solutions as ‘sovereign’.
It would make sense for the EU to invest in its own workers and its own software projects, more so now that there are hostile countries both to the east and to the west. █
____
* An associate explained that "no one, not even Microsoft, uses OOXML. That is an important fact because... DOCX != OOXML, XLSX != OOXML, PPTX != OOXML... DOCX, XLSX, PPTX are all proprietary and although inspired by OOXML are not it and there are different versions of the above, as usual, to drive sales."